Historical Debates

Hello. My name is Mary Full. Brooke.

I'm professor of German history at UCL University College London,

and I'm going to be talking about persecution in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

This is an incredibly contentious topic, given the scale and enormity of the crime.

The murder of six million Jews, six or seven million other noncombatants,

probably around 13 million in total across Europe

who were not involved in armed conflict.

I'm going to start by outlining some of the key historical debates,

both recent and somewhat older.

I'll then go on to consider the different stages of persecution in three phases,

and I'm splitting up these phases slightly

differently from the regular peacetime years.

What I'm years I'm going to consider first of all

the years from 1933 to the later 19 thirties,

maybe 35 to 37.

I'm then going to consider the period

of acute radicalisation and expansion from 1938

through to 1941 so chopping a little bit across the divide between peace and war

and finally then looking at the era of genocide from 1941 until the end of the war,

and in my fifth and final module,

I'll offer some brief reflections on the aftermath of the Holocaust,

so the first topic is historical debates. Older and more recent.

I think the biggest question that historians are

facing at the moment is why Germany?

If you look at it in comparative perspective,

Germany is not where you would think the Holocaust would begin from

if you look at Germany. In 1933 German Jews were highly integrated.

There were high rates of intermarriage, high rates of conversion,

many Children and grandchildren of mixed marriages.

This is very different from the situation

of Jews in some Eastern European countries,

for example,

which had experienced programmes massacres after the first World War,

violence on the ground in ways not seen in Germany.

So a new form of racialised anti Semitism had to be introduced in Germany,

a new way of considering Jews as a distinctly different

ethnic group rather than simply religious or cultural community.

Obviously,

we can talk about the long term context and the short term historical context,

the impact of defeat in the first World War, the Versailles Treaty,

the difficulties with the political system of the Weimar Republic,

the impact of the depression,

the rise of the S. D. A p the Nazi

Party.

But in a sense, all these things had an impact to across Europe.

If we look at the newly created states in Eastern Europe,

with the collapse of the big empires, there is the rise of, uh,

ethno nationalist parties.

There's a rise of incredible nationalism. There is anti Semitism,

and, uh, everywhere was hit by the Depression,

exacerbating social and economic tensions in the late 19 twenties,

early 19 thirties.

So we have to look at the unique

combination of circumstances in Hitler's Germany to try

and understand how what was unthinkable in 1932

before Hitler came to power had become murderous reality

simply a decade later.

So that's one of the big questions. What is different about Germany?

And it raises the other wider question that a

lot of people have been debating recently how far

the Holocaust is unique or comparable to other genocides

across the world before and since the Holocaust,

other mass killings that don't necessarily

qualify for the definition of genocide.

More recently,

there have been debates about issues around colonialism and how far Germany and the

Holocaust can be understood in the framework

of theories about colonialism and post colonialism.

But as far as Germany itself is concerned, there are some specific debates,

some of which are older and effectively over but

have proved quite productive and some more recent.

So let me just briefly list these debates in a sense,

and then we'll look at their implications in some of the subsequent modules.

The older debate that sits in every textbook about Nazi Germany is

the one between the so called structural lists or functional lists,

as they're sometimes known,

and the so called intentional lists.

The intentional ists

focus on Hitler's intentions. Hence the name Hitler had intended

elimination of the Jews all along.

It's the easiest position to understand there's a straight line,

as one person put it from mine.

Comfort to Auschwitz and Hitler is viewed as

a powerful figure in a totalitarian state.

The alternative to this and this was a major debate in

the 19 eighties was on the part of the function list,

or structuralist position, where hunts Momsen, for example,

a German historian who was very prominent in this debate,

talked about cumulative radicalisation.

The argument was that Hitler may have had crazy intentions.

He was clearly a powerful central figure,

but he could never have realised his intentions

in

other situations.

What was crucial about Germany was what was called a poly chromatic state,

a state with many competing different centres of power.

And as a product of this chaotic, overlapping spheres of competence,

Hitler emerged as the only powerful figure

whose intentions made all the difference,

and people leaned over backwards to, as in Kershaw,

notably put it work towards the Fuhrer.

Kershaw, great historian of Hitler,

picked up on a phrase that was used at the time working towards the Fuhrer

and suggested that in this curious, chaotic multiple centres of power situation,

people were striving to do what they felt to be the Fuhrer's will.

Moreover, Hitler as a charismatic leader figure, was charismatic,

not purely by virtue of his personality,

his piercing eyes and all the other things that people talk about.

But precisely because there was no clear direct line of author pretty

if different

areas of the state all said, this is their area of authority,

then the only way to decide was what was the Fuhrer's will.

And so this peculiar system produced the outcome.

Now that was an older debate, and it's really been superseded in two ways. One,

everyone agrees that Hitler is central. His will made a difference, but to not,

as the older intention list saw it in a totalitarian, streamlined dictatorship,

but rather in apology critic state.

So we've kind of got the best of both positions, if you like the strong

dictator Hitler. But within a

state where there are competing multiple centres of power.

That debate, as I say, has been somewhat sidelined by other debates.

The nature of German society in the 19 thirties

and the more recent perpetrator research into the wartime years

as far as German society in the 19 thirties is concerned, Um,

there are three areas really that have been developing.

There are continuing debates over the

relative importance of coercion versus consents,

repression versus consensual dictatorship.

Popular participation.

And I think again this is a debate which is

getting ever more interesting as people understand that apparent consensus

apparent consent may actually mask a great deal of fear

caused by the repressive terroristic apparatus of the SS,

the concentration camps.

A second area, which has been recently developing quite a lot or in the last decades,

is the research into popular opinion again in Kershaw, a major

author in this area,

David Bankia and others looking at contemporary opinion reports.

But again, this, I think, is slightly out of date now,

in the sense that it doesn't matter so much what people's opinions or attitudes were

on any given topic at a particular time has caught in snapshot opinion research,

but rather what they did, how they acted, how they behaved,

how they've changed over time

and the third area.

That is particularly interesting, I think,

on the significance of German society in recent debates

is an area taking off from the notion of Foxconn Mineshaft,

the ethnic folk community.

This is a debate that really took off from work by Michelle,

built in Germany and others,

and this is a new area of development outside the older.

Was there a Nazi Social Revolution Debates,

which came from the 19 sixties David Schoen Baum's book, for example,

and this debate on the Fox combined shaft has really taken off from what's

been called by historians the cultural turn of the 19 eighties and 19 nineties.

Um,

I think critics of using the concept of Foxconn.

Mineshaft don't adequately realise that the significance of this lies less in.

How much do Germans buy into it? How much did they feel?

Part of the wider false mineshaft?

Which is what a lot of the controversy has been about, but actually

the fundamental significance of the concept for X conclusion,

for ousting those who are now seen as no longer part of

the false mineshaft for one reason or another and were persecuted.

Finally, in terms of recent debates,

I think the most significant set of developments has been

in what's called perpetrator research tater for song in German,

which has really expanded over the last couple of decades.

Uh, the older culprits,

who were seen as the chief perpetrators since the war on words, were, of course,

the top political leaders Hitler, Himmler, Heidrick, Goebbels, Goring and so on.

And of course,

culprits such as the S S,

which already in the 19 fifties was termed the

alibi of the nation because people just said,

Oh, the SS,

they did it. We weren't responsible. It was just the SS.

But I think in the last 10 20 years,

historians have been exploring ever more how

far wider circles were involved as perpetrators

in the crimes of Nazi Germany.

There is no single explanation,

so

ideology may have played a role specifically for the initiators and leaders.

Ideology

is not really anti Semitism but has to do with notions of race and space,

ideological visions of Judeo Bolshevism or international Jewish finance.

And for some people, this has lent the Holocaust a curiously

Messianic quality saw.

Friedlander, the great Holocaust historian,

has talked about what he calls redemptive anti Semitism,

that Hitler's ideology was about saving the world and the future from Jews who

was seen as deadly enemies who are all powerful in West and east.

Others, however, have focused far more on

quite different kinds of motives on the ground goods.

Ali, for example,

talks very much about social envy and greed in relation to material desires.

The motivation and reasons for involvement as perpetrators depends

very much on who you look at and when.

The right security main office, the R S. H. A,

coordinated the security and police forces.

The Einsatzgruppen,

the notorious death squads of the SS Security service and security police,

were clearly ideologically motivated

around 3000 people were involved in the Einsatzgruppen

and they alone were responsible,

together with the helpers and auxiliaries who will

come onto for around 1.5 million deaths.

But when you want to understand face to face killings

of millions on a front stretching from the 2000 kilometres,

from the Baltics to the Black Sea

and in the euthanasia centres and the concentration camps in the region in Poland,

you have to understand that far more people

were involved than simply these obvious high level,

ideologically motivated perpetrators.

And that's where we have to understand

different kinds of motivation and mobilisation.

So here there have been some really quite key developments.

One is the notion of ordinary men or ordinary Germans.

Christopher Browning wrote about the order police,

the reserve police battalions and if we look at the police battalions.

More than 50,000 people belonged to police

battalions that were involved in mass murder.

They were responsible for more than half a million murders.

Police battalion 101 in Poland that Christopher Browning

concentrated on killed some 38,000 people alone,

and what Browning showed was that these were people

who were not particularly motivated by anti Semitism.

Many just did as they were told, and they were changed by the actions they undertook.

There were no serious penalties for refusing to be involved in killing

some requested and were given alternative duties.

Others, after the first frightful experience,

became manure to what they were doing and treated

simply treated it simply as their day job.

Yet based on many of the similar sources,

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his book Hitler's Willing Executioners,

which is an extremely readable book,

a very vivid set of accounts and descriptions came up with a quite different,

radically different explanation.

He posited. And I think no historian accepts this.

But he posited what he called a mentality

of elimination ist anti Semitism persisting across centuries

and argued that this was vital to why

the killers did the killing.

There are all sorts of problems with that book,

and I think professional historians in the controversy after it

really picked up on many of the difficulties with trying to

assume there is an enduring mentality across centuries which can suddenly

explain the Holocaust when it's legitimate and unleashed by Hitler,

and then suddenly disappear when political systems change.

After 1945. It doesn't stand up.

Other areas that have had a far

more detailed exploration in recent historical debates

include the Army, the Vermont, the German Very smart.

This is quite extraordinary.

At the same time as the Gold Hargon debate was developing,

there was an exhibition on the crimes of

the Wehrmacht in 1995 a travelling exhibition which unleashed

a similarly enormous controversy because what it effectively said

was that we had concentrated on the SS,

the Einsatzgruppen and so on the obvious perpetrators.

But actually

millions of ordinary soldiers were involved to

even at the most conservative estimate.

If you say only 5% of the young men who were called up conscripted into the army,

even if only 5% of them were involved in some way in the killings on the Eastern Front,

we're still talking about anything.

Up to three quarters of a million people

and people in Germany in the 19 nineties,

most of them had grandparents or great uncles or parents,

even who had been in the army.

This was actually castigating a very large proportion of the

German population as having been contaminated by involvement in the Holocaust

what we do now know the numbers remain controversial.

There is no definitive estimate. It could have been a quarter of a million.

It could have been three quarters of a million.

But what we do know was that the army was

crucial in facilitating major mass killings on the eastern front,

in some cases just facilitating the area in other cases,

actually going in and doing the killing.

So in a whole variety of ways,

they actively cooperated with the Einsatzgruppen with the SS and police forces.

The army also ran prisoner of war camps in

which they willfully left literally hundreds of thousands,

maybe 2.5 million three million prisoners of war to starve.

This was a deliberate, conscious policy of sticking

non competence prisoners of war in camps where

they were left to die through starvation.

Then we have civilians,

professionals in various capacities the government

ministries in Berlin who were involved

in planning and directing racial policies across the right and across the occupied

and annexed territories.

We have the civil administrators in the various different

territories who participated in persecution through cutting rations through

ghetto ising through holding peace people in conditions in

which they would inevitably die of malnutrition and disease

and who created the conditions that just simply made it easier for

them to be eventually rounded up and deported to the death camps.

We have employers, many of whom may never have joined the Nazi party,

who profited from forced and slave labour

under conditions that are

sometimes summarised as

extermination through work finished doing our bite.

We have physicians, medical personnel,

nurses who assisted in compulsory sterilisation

and in the euthanasia programme or in medical experiments,

things I'll talk about a little while.

And we have many other professionals population planners, journalists,

filmmakers, experts in a range of fields who assisted the Nazi regime.

Beyond Germans.

We have collaborators and auxiliaries across Europe in one form or another,

and we have onlookers and helpers and profiteers in the surrounding societies.

So we're talking about millions of people across

Europe involved in making the Holocaust possible.

This is not simply a German question,

but clearly

Germany is at the heart of it.

So we need now to look at the way in which policies of persecution developed,

first of all, within Nazi Germany itself.